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Bloomberg News -Zachary Tracer- April 18, 2017, 8:27 AM PDT UnitedHealth Group Inc. is doing well doing business with the U.S. government. Just not in Obamacare. The company has added more than a million customers in its federally-funded Medicare and Medicaid businesses since Dec. 31, bringing the total in the company’s public programs and seniors unit to 14.9 million, it said in a statement Tuesday announcing first-quarter results. It had a total medical membership of 49.3 million people, even after largely quitting the Affordable Care Act’s markets that many insurers once regarded as a source of millions of new customers. Shares of the biggest publicly traded U.S. health insurer gained 1 percent to $168.90 at 10:50 a.m. in New York. They’re up 31 percent in the last 12 months through Monday’s close. The company has been expanding in Medicare, where it offers private health plans for the elderly, and in Medicaid, where it helps states manage low-income individuals. Those businesses have proven to be more lucrative than Obamacare’s individual market, where UnitedHealth broadly retreated after offering plans on the health law’s exchanges in 34 states last year. The trends in UnitedHealth’s government business will help boost profits. The Minnetonka, Minnesota-based company predicted that earnings for the full year, excluding some items, will be $9.65 to $9.85 a share. That’s well above the $9.51 projected by analysts, according to an average of estimates compiled by Bloomberg, and above the company’s January forecast. First-quarter earnings excluding some items were $2.37 a share, topping the $2.17 average of analysts’ estimates. Distracted Rivals UnitedHealth has also benefited from the entanglement of its major rivals in two massive deals. Humana Inc. and Aetna Inc., the No. 2 and No. 3 sellers [...]

Confused about Medicare / Medicaid issues? Ask the experts at The Firm Services Published: Thursday, April 13, 2017 11:19 p.m. CDT • Updated: Thursday, April 13, 2017 11:19 p.m. CDT By Trudy Lieberman, Rural Health News Service What’s going to happen to Medicare? That’s not an insignificant question given the political shift in Washington. Now, with Republicans controlling the presidency and both houses of Congress, some ideas they’ve been pushing for years have a chance of passing. Those ideas would drastically change the way Medicare works for those already on it and those joining in the next few years. Medicare is wildly popular, but that popularity doesn’t necessarily translate into understanding of a very complex program, what’s happened to it, and what may happen. Writing about Medicare for nearly 30 years and watching it evolve, I’ve seen how easily Congress has already made big changes with hardly a peep from the press or the public. The same could happen again. In this column, I discuss a few of those possible changes gleaned from my decades of experience covering the program. Since the election, there’s been talk of “voucherizing” or privatizing Medicare, an idea Republicans have been pushing for 20 years. Under a fully privatized arrangement, Medicare would no longer be social insurance like Social Security but more like Obamacare with everyone eventually buying their coverage from private insurance companies. Beneficiaries would receive a sum of money, likely to be called “premium support” instead of the more dire-sounding “voucher,” to help buy their coverage. The amount of support and how well it would keep pace with medical inflation would be buried in the details Congress would hash out. Today, the government provides the benefits [...]

The Accenture study also finds that half of these victims were subject to medical identity theft and on average had to pay $2,500 in out-of-pocket costs per incident. Healthcare IT News - By Bill Siwicki February 20, 201708:23 AM Twenty-six percent of U.S. consumers have had their personal medical information stolen from healthcare information systems, according to results of a new study from Accenture released today at HIMSS17 in Orlando. The findings show that 50 percent of those who experienced a breach were victims of medical identity theft and had to pay approximately $2,500 in out-of-pocket costs per incident, on average. In addition, the survey of 2,000 U.S. consumers found that the breaches were most likely to occur in hospitals (the location cited by 36 percent of respondents who experienced a breach), followed by urgent-care clinics (22 percent), pharmacies (22 percent), physicians’ offices (21 percent) and health insurers (21 percent). 50 percent of consumers who experienced a breach found out about it themselves, through noting an error on their credit card statement or benefits explanation, whereas only 33 percent were alerted to the breach by the organization where it occurred, and only 15 percent were alerted by a government agency, according to the survey. Among those who experienced a breach, 50 percent were victims of medical identity theft, the survey found. Most often, the stolen identity was used to purchase items (cited by 37 percent of data-breached respondents) or used for fraudulent activities, such as billing for care (37 percent) or filling prescriptions (26 percent). Nearly one-third of consumers had their social security number (31 percent), contact information (31 percent) or medical data (31 percent) compromised, according to the survey. Unlike credit card identity theft, where [...]

Bloomberg- by Zachary Tracer , David McLaughlin , and Andrew M Harris February 8, 2017, 4:05 PM PST February 9, 2017, 2:37 PM PST After 18 months of courtship and court cases, two massive deals that would have reshaped the U.S. health insurance industry have both been declared dead, blocked by judges who said they’d do unacceptable harm to competition in the industry. Now, the companies are right back where they started. Anthem Inc.’s $48 billion deal to buy Cigna Corp. was blocked by a federal judge late Wednesday, weeks after another judge halted Aetna Inc.’s bid for Humana Inc. Anthem filed a notice of appeal on Thursday, and Aetna and Humana have said they’re still deciding whether to appeal. The question now becomes what the companies will do with the large piles of cash they allocated for the acquisitions, and whether they’ll try anew at fresh takeovers under a Trump administration, whose antitrust officials could be more amenable to large consolidations. They could also opt for something more conservative in the face of widespread uncertainty about the future of the U.S. health system. But first, they may be back in court. “Anthem is significantly disappointed by the decision,” Chief Executive Officer Joseph Swedish said in a statement. “If not overturned, the consequences of the decision are far-reaching and will hurt American consumers.” Cigna, for its part, said it “intends to carefully review the opinion and evaluate its options in accordance with the merger agreement.” CEO David Cordani has estimated that his company will have $7 billion to $14 billion of deployable capital, with the high end including extra debt the company could take on if it decided to make acquisitions. “We have a track record [...]